Historical and religious criticism,
educational and social problems, had taken possession of his
thought, and the philosophy of evolution had transformed the
whole tenor of his ideas, shaping them to, deeper issues and
more practical purposes than had hitherto engaged them. He had
read widely and variously in Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Muller, and
Taine; he had, in short, scaled the "lofty mountains" that had so
hemmed in his early view, and made his way into the intellectual
kingdoms of the modern world that lay beyond. The _Weltgeist_
had appealed to him with its irresistible behest, just as it
appealed at about the same time to Ibsen and Tolstoy and Ruskin,
and had made him a man of new interests and ideals.
One might have found foreshadowings of this transformation in
certain of his earlier works,--in "The Newly Married Couple,"
for example, with its delicate analysis, of a common domestic
relation, or in "The Fisher Maiden," with its touch of modernity,
--but from these suggestions one could hardly have prophesied
the enthusiasm and the genial force with which Bjornson was to
project his personality into the controversial arena of modern life.
The series of works which have come from his pen during the past
thirty-five years have dealt with most of the graver problems
which concern society as a whole,--politics, religion, education,
the status of women, the license of the press, the demand of the
socialist for a reconstruction of the old order.
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